Now the bearded one owns one of each of the long-hood 911s from 1964 to 1973. But memories of Earl’s Court crystalized his desires, and he became a Porsche Club member in 2001. The expanding apparel business allowed Walker to fulfill his love of cars a collection soon grew. His California clothing line took off, and when he married wife Karen in 1994, they began a fashion label called Serious Clothing. That first 911 was bought for $12,000 when he was 25. His new life was in Los Angeles, where he started selling customized second-hand clothing in Venice in 1989. He hung out on the East Coast for a while as a camp counselor, then headed westward again–by bus and for good. Wanderlust hit Walker hard as a teen, and he headed west to America in 1986 at age 19. They apparently responded: Call us when you get older. He wrote a letter to Porsche, saying he wanted to be one of its designers. Before him lay a white 1978 Porsche 911 Turbo 3.3 Martini, with its red and blue side stripe not unlike the car he had on a bedroom poster. He admits his passion for Porsches began during a visit as a 10-year-old to the Earl’s Court Motor Show in London. Walker grew up in Sheffield, a north-central borough in England. So the follow-up car is a short-wheelbase car with a narrow body.” It just came out very well and the timing was perfect. “For me, the STR sort of set my benchmark as high as it has ever been personally for a car that I had built. The follow-up album is slightly daunting because you sort of want it to be better than the one before,” he says. It is sort of like a band putting out their first album. “I guess the method is that the current car I am building, of course, has to surpass the car I built before. They are all a bit subtle, products of a personal challenge to keep building things that he personally wants to build and cars he wants to drive with a goal of “pleasing myself.” It’s just his personal interpretation of his favorite Porsches of the mid-’60s to early ’70s. Walker, his voice soft with a lilt of England still in it, said there is really no method to what he builds. And it’s not the bearded man’s first dance with the rear-engined sports coupe from Stuttgart: Walker has more than 40, some “sports purpose” streetable track-type 911s he’s remade himself. It’s one of his creations, the STRII as he calls it, built the way he wanted it. Walker, who bought the first of now dozens of Porsche 911s in 1992 as a 25-year-old ex-pat Brit living in Los Angeles, went straight to a low-slung 1972 model parked in the grass nearby. He’s definitely a standout here at the Ponte Vedra Auto Show on Northeast Florida’s coast. Under it drapes, long, dreadlocked hair, one braided strand hanging down to his left knee. Then Magnus Walker unfolds his lanky frame from the Carrera, wearing a bowler hat with an Urban Outlaw sticker stuck in the hatband. The left arm hangs out of the new metallic brown Porsche 911’s window as it passes, a red-patterned shirt hiding an inked sleeve with tattoos of an American eagle, a screaming Thrush muffler bird logo, and flames flowing from under the driver’s black chronograph.
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